Travel Tip: Pop Culture and Cinema in EnglandWalking With Dinosaurs

Walking with Dinosaurs – The Live Experience

Walking With DinosaursENGLANDLONDON • O2 Arena • Ongoing

Drawing its inspiration from the internationally acclaimed BBC documentary series Walking With Dinosaurs - seen by a world-wide audience of over 700 million - the live arena production credits TV series’ creator/ producer Tim Haynes.

Fifteen life-like and life-size dinosaurs have been brought to life by a team of specialist engineers employing technologies and techniques from film, animatronics, conventional puppetry and physical theater.

Ten species are represented from the entire 200 million year reign of the dinosaurs.

The show includes the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the terror of the ancient terrain, as well as the Plateosaurus and Liliensternus from the Triassic period, the Stegosaurus and Allosaurus from the Jurassic period and Torosaurus and Utahraptor from the awesome Cretaceous. The largest of them, the Brachiosaurus is 36 feet tall, and 56 feet from nose to tail. It took a team of 50 – including engineers, fabricators, skin makers, artists and painters, and animatronic experts – a year to build the original production. The show depicts the dinosaurs’ evolution, complete with the climatic and tectonic changes that took place, which led to the demise of many species. Walking with Dinosaurs has scenes of the interactions between dinosaurs, and the audience sees how carnivorous dinosaurs evolved to walk on two legs, and how the herbivores fended off their more agile predators.

The history of the world is played out with the splitting of the earth’s continents, and the transition from the arid desert of the Triassic period is given over to the lush green prairies and forces of the later Jurassic. Oceans form, volcanoes erupt, a forest catches fire -- all leading to the impact of the massive comet, which struck the earth, and forced the extinction of the dinosaurs.